ON
THE DAY of closing statements, March 15, 2000, Mr Justice
Gray invited the Defendants to submit a supplementary note
on certain matters of history (see transcript,
Day 32).
Mr Richard Rampton QC (right) submitted this unusual note,
two days after the closing speeches had been
made.

Prepared in accordance with the request
of the Honourable Mr Justice Gray made on 15 March
2000.

THE purpose of this note is to demonstrate, by reference
to key documents and events already referred to in the two
chronologies contained m section 5(i)(e)(A) and 5(ii)
(principally the latter) of the D[efendant']s main
submission, that the proposition that Hitler did not know
about or authorise the genesis and implementation of the
mass extermination of the Jews by gassing is
unsustainable.

2. Following Hitler's statement of 18 August 1941 that
his prophecy of 30 January 1939 was coming true, on. 24
August 1941 Hitler called a halt to the euthanasia programme
which he had initiated in October 1939. The gassing
specialists of the euthanasia programme were then
transferred to the East. In September 1941 an experimental
gassing of Soviet POW's and others took place in Auschwitz
(see page 1 of 5(ii)).

3. During October 1941 Hitler twice more referred to the
importance of exterminating ('ausrotten') the Jewish plague
(6 and 21 October 1941).

4. On 23 October 1941 Jewish emigration from the German
sphere of influence was forbidden.

5. On 25 October 1941 Himmler met Globocnik in Mogilev,
where an extermination camp was about to be built, to
receive a report of a meeting between Globocnik and Frank,
the General Governor. On the same day, Wetzel of the
Ostministerium in Berlin met Brack of the Führer's
Chancellery, who had been involved in the euthanasia
programme; and then Eichmann, Heydrich's special adviser on
Jewish policy, Wetzel then drafted a letter to be sent by
his boss, Rosenberg, the Reichsminister for the Occupied
Eastern Territories, to Lohse, the Reichskommissar for the
Ostland. According to this letter, Brack was ready to help
construct gassing apparatuses in Riga and there were no
objections if Jews not fit for work were "removed" by these
apparatuses. Then, on the evening of the same day, Himmler
and Heydrich met Hitler.

6. At this meeting Hitler is recorded as having made yet
further reference to the extermination ('ausrotten') of the
Jews; which, of course, had already been under way, by means
of shooting, for some time and was about to start by means
of systematic, large-scale gassing.

7. In the early part of November 1941, there was the
first testing of a gas van in Sachsenhausen, in which 30
prisoners were killed by exhaust fumes; and the construction
of the extermination camp at Belzec commenced.

8. On the evening of 16 November 1941, at the
Wolfsschanze, Himmler and Rosenberg met Hitler. Earlier that
day, Goebbels' article in 'Das Reich' had appeared, in which
he made reference back to Hitler's 1939 prophecy and noted
that the prophecy was now being fulfilled.

9. On 17 November 1941, following the previous evening's
meeting with Hitler, Himmler, now at his own headquarters in
East Prussia, telephoned Heydrich in Berlin and spoke about
his meeting with Rosenberg, the conditions in the General
Government and the disposal or doing away with
('Beseitigung') of the Jews.

10. On the next day, 18 November 1941, Rosenberg himself,
having returned to Berlin from his meeting with Hitler and
Himmler at the Wolfsschanze, gave a confidential briefing to
the German press in which he stated that the problem posed
by the 6 million Jews still living in the East could only be
solved by a biological eradication ('biologische
Ausmerzung') of the whole of Jewry in Europe.

11. On 22 November 1941, Goebbels recorded in his diary
that Hitler wanted an energetic policy against the Jews, but
one which did not cause unnecessary difficulties. And on 1
December 1941, Hitler at is table talk again confirmed that
the Jews were now in the process of being destroyed.

12. Thus it can be seen that throughout the autumn of
1941, Hitler was making increasingly blunt statements about
the fate of the Jews, while at the same time the foundations
of the programme to exterminate the Jews by gassing were
being laid.

13. From this date (as the following paragraphs of this
Note demonstrate), Hitler's expressions of his attitudes and
intentions towards the Jews become even more frequent and
radical. At the same time the development of the gassing
programme can dearly be traced. The first stage in this
further radicalisation of Hitler's expression of his
thoughts and intentions begins with his speech to the
Reichs- and Gauleiters on 12 December 1941 and continues
through into the first part of January 1942. Then, after the
Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942, there occurs a whole
series of statements beginning on 25 January and going on to
the end of April 1942, which, in their frequency and their
unrestrained language, are without parallel, up to this
date, in the record of Hitler's statements about the fate of
the Jews.

14. When the chronology of these statements, with their
increasingly uncompromising language, is set against the
evidence of:

i) what Himmler was actually in the process of
putting into effect;

ii) the close relationship between Hitler and Himmler
and the frequency and timing of their meetings; and

iii) what (as is common ground) even Goebbels had
learned from Himmler about what was happening to the Jews
in the East, the inescapable conclusion is that Hitler
had full knowledge at every stage of what Himmler was
doing, with the necessary consequence that it was being
done with Hitler's full authority and approval.

15. What, of course, Himmler was in fact doing, from
October 1941 onwards, was to organise a gigantic homicidal
gassing programme; first, of the Jews of the Warthegau and
Poland, and, then, from the late spring of 1942, of the Jews
from the rest of Europe, at camps specially designed and
built for that purpose.

16. There is, of course, no explicit evidence that Hitler
and Himmler discussed the extermination of the Jews by
gassing. However, since

i) as Himmler's note of 18 December 1941 and
Report no 51 of 29 December 1942. show, the two men were
evidently quite open with each other about the
mass-murder of the Russian and Baltic Jews by shooting;

ii) it is apparent that, by late 1941, gassing had
become the preferred option for killing the rest of
Europe's Jews; and

iii) it is clear that the detailed discussions between
Hitler and Goebbels recorded in his diary for 27 March
and 27 April 1942 almost certainly covered not only
the/act of the mass-murders in the General Government,
but also the method (gassing) by which they were being
carried out (there is no record of any mass-shooting of
Jews in the General Government),

it is inconceivable that Himmler did not also discuss
this in detail with Hitler. On the contrary, any other
conclusion would be, as a matter of historiography, wholly
perverse.

17. This is confirmed by the fact that when, in March and
July 1942, there were significant escalations in the gassing
programme, Himmler paid a two or three day visit to the
General Government. On each occasion, his visit was
immediately preceded by a meeting or meetings with Hitler
and immediately followed on his return by a further meeting
or meetings. The obvious inference to be drawn from. this
pattern is that Himmler briefed Hitler and/or was briefed by
Hitler as to what orders needed to be given to, and what
information obtained from, the General Government before he
went and, on his return, duly reported to Hitler what had
been achieved and still needed to be achieved.

18. On 8 December 1941, the mass murder of Jews in gas
vans at Chelmno began.

19. 9 December 1941 was the date originally scheduled for
the Wannsee Conference.

20. On 12 December 1941, Hitler made his speech to the
top echelons of the Nazi party in which, once again, he
confirmed the fulfilment of his 1939 prophecy by particular
reference to the escalation of the war into a World War, in
consequence of his previous day's declaration of war against
the United States. This stance was reflected in Rosenberg's
diary entry for 14 December 1941.

21. Hans Frank, the Governor General, was one of those
who attended Hitler's speech on 12 December 1941. On 16
December, upon his return to the General Government, Frank
reported that he had been told in Berlin that the General
Government must liquidate its own Jews. He stated that,
while he did not yet know precisely how this enormous task
was to be achieved, he was certain that some kind of action
would be taken which would lead to a successful destruction
("Vernichtungserfolg") of the Jews in the General
Government.

22. In his New Year's address in January 1942, Hitler
again confirmed that it would be the Jews, rather than the
Aryan peoples of Europe, who would be exterminated
("ausrotten").

23. The Wannsee Conference, postponed from 9 December
1941, took place on 20 January 1942. At this Conference,
Bühler, State Secretary in the General Government,
urged that the Final Solution should begin in the General
Government because there were no transport problems there
and most of the Jews were anyway incapable of work.
Moreover, although the protocol of the Conference does not
contain any explicit references to means of mass
extermination, Eichmann later testified (1961) that in fact
the talk was all of killing and liquidation, disguised in
the protocol by euphemisms'.

24. In his table talk of 25 January 1942, and again in a
widely transmitted speech in the Reichstag on 30 January
1942, Hitler once more spoke of the need for the total
extermination ("Ausrottung") of the Jews in Europe.

25. The following day, 31 January 1942, Eichmann sent an
express letter ("Schnellbrief") to head and subsidiary
offices of the Gestapo, announcing that the recent
evacuations of Jews from individual areas to the East
constituted the beginning of the Final Solution of the
Jewish Question in the Ostmark (Austria) and the Protektorat
of Bohemia and Moravia (Czechoslovakia).

26. In February 1942, the German and Slovakian
Governments reached agreement that Slovak Jews fit for work
would be deported to Auschwitz. The agreement also provided
that the Slovaks would pay the 55 also to deport the old,
the sick and the unfit to Auschwitz at a cost of 500
Reichsmarks per Jew. The implementation of this agreement
was announced by the Slovak Prime Minister on 3 March 1942.
He told the Slovak State Council that the Nazis had arranged
to take Slovakia's remaining 70,000 Jews, who would remain
permanently in the Eastern territories, never to return.

27. On 14, 22 and 24 February 1942, Hitler once again
made unequivocal statements about the necessity of
exterminating the Jewish bacillus, the Jewish parasites. To
describe this process, he variously used the terms,
"vernichten", "eliminieren", and "ausrotten".

28. In the middle of March 1942, Himmler made the first
of the two visits to the General Government which are
mentioned above (para 17):

i) On 10 March 1942, Himmler had dinner with
Hitler.

ii) On 11 March 1942, Himmler spoke on the telephone
with Heydrich, when they discussed the Judenfrage.

iii) On 13 March 1942, Himmler travelled to Cracow,
where he met Frank and Krüger.

iv) On 14 March 1942. Himmler went from Cracow to
Lublin, where he met Krüger and Globocnik, returning
to Berlin on 15 March 1942.

v) On 17 March 1942, he travelled to the Wolfsschanze,
where he had lunch and dinner with Hitler.

29. Meanwhile, on 16 March 1942, as clearing of the
Lublin ghetto began. On the same day, there was a meeting
between Höfle, of Globocnik's staff, and Türk, of
the Lublin district department of population and welfare, at
which it was decided that the Jews arriving on transports at
Lublin should be divided into those who were capable and
those who were not capable of work and that those who were
not capable of work should all go to Belzec.

30. On 17 March 1942 the first Jews of the General
Government transported to Belzec were gassed. From that date
onwards, transports of vast numbers of Jews arrived at
Belzec and were gassed.

31. In the same month (March 1942), the construction of
Sobibor began and bunker 1 at Auschwitz was put into
operation as a gaschamber.

32. On 19 March 1942, as Goebbels' diary entry for 20
M2rch 1942 records, he and Hitler spoke about the Jewish
Question. Goebbels records that Hitler remained merciless
("unerbittlich") and that he stated that "the Jews must get
out of Europe, if necessary, by the application of the most
brutal methods".

33. In his diary entry for 27 March 1942, Goebbels
records what was evidently a long discussion between himself
and Hitler about what was happening to the Jews in the
General Government, that is, that they were being gassed in
vast numbers (see para 16(iii) above).

34. On 10 April 1942, the Slovakian Prime Minister, Tuka,
met Heydrich. Heydrich explained that the deportation of
Slovakian Jews (to Auschwitz) was only part of a programme
of resettlement of half a million Jews out of Europe to the
East. It is not plausible that Heydrich could have made so
large a statement to a foreign Prime Minister without the
authority of Hitler.

35. On 11 April 1942, Harald Turner wrote from Serbia to
Karl Wolff, reporting on the proposed gassing of Serbian
Jewish women and children. The significance of this is that
the letter was sent not directly to Heydrich or Himmler, but
to Wolff, who was Himmler's liaison officer, permanently
attached to Hitler's headquarters.

36. On 26 April 1942, as Goebbels records, he and Hitler
once again had a very detailed ("ausführliche")
discussion about the Jewish Question. It was noted that
Himmler was "at this moment carrying on the greatest
resettlement of Jews from the German cities to the Eastern
ghettos". This was, of course, only possible because the
Jews already herded into the Eastern ghettos had been, and
were being, evacuated to the gassing camps.

37. At the end of April or beginning of May 1942, the
first gassings of Jews from the ghettos in the General
Government took place at Sobibor'. Meanwhile, at about this
time, the construction of the last of the Reinhard
extermination camps, Treblinka, began.

38. Meanwhile, during the first five or six months of
1942, the gassing facility at Chelmno had succeeded in
fulfilling the promise made on 1 May 1942 by the
Reichsstatthalter of the Warthegau (Greiser) to Himmler that
some 100,000 Jews in his territory would be killed by the
middle of the year.

39. Throughout May and June 1942, vast numbers of Jews in
the Warthegau and in the General Government were killed by
gassing. During the same period, gassings at Auschwitz were
taking place on a considerable scale in bunker 1, and bunker
2 was put into operation in July 1942, while on 4 July 1942
the first transports of Jews from Slovakia were submitted to
selection at Auschwitz.

40. It was during July 1942 that Himmler made his second
visit to the General Government (see para 17 above). During
this trip, he also visited Auschwitz, which was a part of
the territory of the Reich and fell directly under the
jurisdiction of Himmler himself (rather than the
jurisdiction of Globocnik and the General Government). The
significance of this is that those in charge of the
extermination process at Auschwitz took their orders
directly from Himmler.

41. The relevant events in this context are:

i) On 8 July 1942, Himmler had dinner with
Hitler;

ii) On 14 July 1942, Himmler had lunch with
Hitler;

iii) On 16 July 1942, Wolff, on behalf of Himmler,
spoke to Ganzenmüller, a senior official in the
Ministry of Transport, about the difficulties being
experienced by rail-transports to the extermination
camps, in particular, Sobibor.

iv) On 17 July, Himmler went to Auschwitz from his
headquarters in East Prussia and met, amongst others, the
Commandant of Auschwitz, Höss.

v) Himmler was at Auschwitz again the next day, 18
July 1942, whence he travelled to Lublin in the
afternoon, and met Krüger, Globocnik and Pohl.

vi) Himmler remained in Lublin on 19 July 1942, and,
on the same day, gave written orders to Krüger that
the extermination of the entire Jewish population of the
General Government was to be completed by the end of the
year. The only exceptions were to be Jews employed for
the Nazi war economy in ghettos such as Warsaw .

vii) On 20 July 1942, Himmler returned to Berlin.

viii) On 22 July 1942, massive deportations began from
Warsaw to Treblinka and from Przemysl to Belzec. There
were also deportations from the northern Lublin district,
Radom and Bialystok to Treblinka (see letter
Ganzenmüller to Wolff of 28 July 1942).

ix) On the same day, 22 July 1942, Globocnik wrote to
Wolff, expressing gratitude that all the new work which
Himmler had ordered would result in the fulfilment of the
most secret wishes of all concerned and promising that
the project would be completed in the shortest time. By
this, of course, he meant the completion, by the end of
the year, of the extermination, by gassing, of the Jews
in the General Government which Himmler had ordered on 19
July 1942.

x) On 23 July 1942, the killings, by gassing, began at
Treblinka.

xi) On 24 July 1942, Himmler travelled from Berlin to
his own new headquarters near Zhitomir in the Ukraine;
and, on 25 July 1942, from there to Hitler's headquarters
in the Ukraine ("Wehrwolf"), where he had lunch with
Hitler.

xii) On 27 July 1942, Himmler again travelled to the
Wehrwolf and had lunch with

42. On 13 August 1942, Wolff replied to
Ganzenmüller's letter of 28 July 1942, thanking him for
his efforts and noting "with particular joy the assurance
that for two weeks now a train has been carrying, every day,
5,000 members of the chosen people ("auserwählten
Volk") to Treblinka" .

43. On 19 August 1942, there was meeting at Auschwitz,
chaired by the architect Fritz Ertl, and attended by members
of the Central Construction Office at Auschwitz and Kurt
Prüfer of Topf & Sons, at which the construction of
the four new crematoria at Birkenau was discussed. The note
of the meeting made reference to "bathhouses

for special actions" ("Badeanstalten für
Sonderaktionen")'. This is the first document of those which
survive which records the transformation of
Auschwitz-Birkenau into a facility for mass-extermination by
means of hydrogen cyanide gas.

44. Thus, the preparations for the full extent of the
programme for mass extermination by gassing were now in
place.

45. In the light of the scale of the programme, the fact
that it was overseen and orchestrated by Himmler, the nature
of Himmler's relationship with Hitler and of the record, set
out above, of Hitler's own thoughts and statements during
the period of the programme's genesis and implementation,
there can be no doubt of Hitler's knowledge of and authority
for the full extent of what was done.

Richard Rampton QC17 March 2000

Comments by David Irving:

45: They have not produced one instance of a phone call
from Himmler to Hitler or vice versa; so the contact was not
as close as it was with e.g. Heydrich. Hitler's own thoughts
as recorded by third parties go exclusively to a
geographical solution (Madagascar, Siberia, Africa, the
East, White Russia) and not to killing. It is from Hitler's
HQ that the orders go out to reduce, limit, postpone, halt
the Final Solution, the mass shootings, the killings of the
Roiman Jews, etc. A rhetorical claim by learned Counsel , no
matter how eminent, that there can be no doubt of somebody's
knowledge, is &emdash; after 55 years of turning over the
archives for hard proof &emdash; a pretty poor substitute
for evidence of a quality comparable with the proof that
exists in abundance for Hitler's other crimes (euthanasia),
and the shootings of the Russian jews (Commissar order,
Jurisdiction order).